Re: [IMail Forum] suggestions...

[MIS Dept]

I have been wondering about the intended purpose of backup MX servers originally and the disadvantages of them being around WHEN there is no need for them.

For example a webhosting site completely went down about 6-8 months ago because of a major power outage in the city for more than 24 hours. (a major power cable was cut on a construction site).

I tried to call their 800 number, local number, to find out why is my website down, all lines were busy or disconnected or not available. I started thinking that the company went bankrupt and got away without even saying bye. (I didn't know about that major power outage until next day.)

Anyway, cutting it short, the Webhosting firm told us later, that they have learned from this incident and will setup a 2nd website and a 2nd 800 number in another state for incidents like this.

I live and work in the Los Angeles area (Glendale) the land of quakes and frequent power outages. Recently I realized, that the backup MX server that is provided to us by our ISP is the MAIN "source" of all the spam mail that our Imail server is receiving and makes half of the spam filtering tools useless because of this.

I was also considering setting up 2 "front runner" MX servers in house hiding the Imail server, (and not use ISP provided MX server) but then I realized, that in case of any power outage or other disaster, the email server and both MX servers would be out of service while the network is down.

I came to the conclusion, that the ideal MX server for a company like us (Architect firm with 80 employees) would be a "ready to deploy" backup MX server OFF SITE, that would be listed as a backup MX server in the DNS records, but normally it would NOT be "available" until I make a phone call to that MX service provider to turn it on because our site went down completely.

This way, spammers could not abuse it during normal business operation because it is off, but as soon some "disaster" strike and I don't see recovering from it within a reasonable time, by making one phone call I can make sure that our firm will not loose any email that were sent to us. (I am mainly concerned out emails that are received because of subscriptions.)

So, what do you guys think? Is there any point here, or I am just not aware of what else is already available out there?

So, the simple question here is this: Do companies, or ISPs have backup MX servers off line (and off site) just for the purpose of turning them on when the WHOLE site of the primary mail servers go down?

Because if there is such thing, then I will strongly consider setting up just one SMTP gateway for spam filtering with Imail server hiding behind it and get a deal with such backup MX service provider. This way all spam will be received by the gateway server, and MX servers will NOT interfere with them during normal business operation.

Geza

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